- Network connections? Their CEO is the former CTO of Facebook.
- Help with fundraising? They raised $80mm at $900mm valuation not more than a month ago.
I strongly suspect Quora is planning a huge pivot which they feel is ambitious but doable in 3 months, and YC believes in the value of this pivot; that is the only plausible explanation I can think of.
Stack Exchange owns the question & answer niche? I don't hardly think so. Yahoo Answers, as bad as it is, is massive, and shows up throughout Google's top results; ditto answers.com; and Quora is a top 500 site.
Stack has seven sites getting at least 100,000 visits per day. One is a break out homerun (Stack Overflow obviously), and it drastically dwarfs the other sites. All but a few of their top 20+ sites are strictly technology focused, and the others are geek friendly (math and video games), so they cross over conveniently.
Most of their network is flailing. Photography is 3 years old and gets a whopping seven questions per day - that's what most of their network looks like.
Stack doesn't even remotely own the Q&A category. They own one piece of it, and will never own anything more than that, because they can't translate success in technical Q&A to other categories well. You can beat StackExchange at any given of their smaller niche sites, because they can't do them as well as someone that is dedicated to just that niche - the same reason Quora et al can't compete with Stack Overflow.
Sure -- you're right that the SE engine is definitely only good at specific things (namely, fact/data/science based questions), but it is arguably the best in the world at those particular things.
What is the Quora engine the best in the world at?
I'd look at growth, too. Even the less popular SE sites grow at very respectable rates. How much is Quora growing?
I would imagine most people reading HN have read at least one blog post on his site, if not many more. It's not that amazing he didn't disclose it in my opinion. I agree it could be mentioned in his profile though, just for the curious.
To me Quora excels at the areas where Stack Exchange fails miserably. Intelligent discussion over a subject (rather than "closed as not constructive").
I think Quora is a totally different product, content wise. You don't go to Quora for programming help unless it's hello world in php. You go there for /r/iama type of questions.
Or it's just my usage, largely influenced by the weekly email.
If Quora plan to pivot, they should change their robots.txt [1] so that Archive.org can crawl their website or post their data dumps like StackOverflow [2]. Others came to the same conclusion today [3].
if you don't, they'll flag you and until you update your name, your account will be frozen (you can read and follow but can't answer) and all your previous answers hidden
The problem with reddit is that it's hard to ask random, potentially "dumb" questions. You have to find the right subreddit, and if you're wrong you'll just be downvoted and receive joke responses. Even in the right subreddit many questions will get instantly downvoted by people browsing /new/. Quota has none of these problems.
Reddit is only "devouring" it because it has no decent competitors. Quora could potentially be one if it at least let you read without registering. I can understand wanting to restrict it to "real name"-type contributions, but it's a major mistake to make it unreadable imo. This also prevents indexing by search engines.
I even have a Quora account, but rarely log into it. Most of the time when I come across an interesting question on Quora and it asks me to log in to read more than the first answer, I say, "Well, I guess it's not that interesting anyway."
I don't use Quora very much, but I have noticed that it seems to be very focused on the identity of the person replying, and even the identity of upvoters. It feels like a great place for senior management in organisations to answer questions about topics related to their roles.
Eh, I dunno. I think it creates an egotistic atmosphere that creates problems for both participants and moderators. Someone is much less likely to admit they were wrong or let something go when their professional headshot, real name, and high-powered corporate position is next to it. They reply because they think they get it, find out they were wrong, but feel they risk embarrassment for themselves and their employer if they admit their mistake or don't vigorously self-defend. Under these conditions, you almost need a PR team to manage your Quora account.
I'm not sure there are right and wrong answers to the vast majority of Quora questions. They tend to be about topics where two different people might give extremely different answers.
I agree that that Quora questions are largely subjective, but many are subjective topics that demand accurate conception of prerequisites to answer effectively. I've personally cringe-worthy threads on Quora where a pseudo-technical executive gives a misconceived response to such a question (that is, not providing an unpopular answer, but providing an answer that is not actually relevant to the question) and proceeds to attempt to defend it, sometimes even falling back on "Well, if I was wrong, I wouldn't be the CXO at BigCorp".
Actually I have started using Quora for the stuff that gets pedantically closed on Stack Overflow, for exactly that reason.
It is useful to get an opinion on which library / language / framework is better for a particular task, or what the pros and cons are. Stack Overflow has a real attitude problem, closing these questions as "not constructive" despite the fact the question has hundreds of upvotes.
Quora is not tech focused, and still feels a bit more like facebook (questions feel more like they are based on how recently they were asked as opposed to outright relevance - though that may the way I view the site, and the way it markets itself to me). But there is a huge opportunity to pick up where Stack Overflow is failing its users.
I'm not sure if you were insinuating that SE's fragmentation was a bad thing. If you are, SE actively fragment's itself for a reason. Watch Spolsky talk about it here: http://vimeo.com/37309773
Quora's non-fragmentation is it's ultimate downfall.
Im not sure yet if the SE fragmentation is a good thing or bad yet. From one perspective I see where they are coming from and why they are doing it. But in today's age of IT where the specialists is dead and people are more-or-less required to be an expert generalist it is very frustrating to use SE. I find myself more or less giving up when a question gets migrated to a SE Im not a 'member' of yet (they should really just make all users IDs members on all their sites whether people use them or not). Whether you are a webmaster, server admin, programmer, general PC user or just want to ask a general question about how SE works, I shouldn't need to go so many places. It's really 50-50 in my mind if they are doing a good thing or bad (and it probably doesnt matter in the end)
But I have never used Quora, so I know nothing about it beyond getting the blurred webpage when you are not a member there. Ill check out that video now.
There are 20 million programmers in the world, that is the maximum S.O. can get. There are billions of people looking for just the type of answers you find on Quora.
Also you go to S.O. to find a specific answer than move on, on Q you stick around and read other stuff, go back for discovery.
I am not saying which one is more valuable, perhaps S.O. is more monetizable.
I've followed many links to Quora but bounced every single time because of the stupid signup wall. Subsequently, I've banned them from my Google search results, same as Experts Exchange. SO and Reddit are sharing the Q&A lunch.
" There are billions of people looking for just the type of answers you find on Quora"
And how many of them are going there? Every indication is "not many".
"Also you go to S.O. to find a specific answer than move on, on Q you stick around and read other stuff, go back for discovery."
By "you" you mean?
I've visited quora maybe a dozen times, usually by following a link from an aggregator like HN. I didn't feel compelled to poke around once I got there, and the comments and replies (though they came from the people with higher reputation) generally ran the same gamut as everywhere else.
StackExchange has much more than just programming sites, and I've done all sorts of discovery via the "questions from other StackExchange sites" ad units and sidebars.
Very interesting move. I love the concept of Quora and used to lose many hours going "Quora surfing." But as I fine-tuned the categories I followed, I found the fun of surfing random topics less enjoyable as my homepage feed filled with the same ole' topics and content.
Recently, I've begun an experiment to see if answering questions within my domain can help with "personal branding." It seems to have netted me a few new followers on Quora and Twitter, but I haven't noticed a substantial benefit yet.
I also started using it as inspiration for blog posts, though I'm blogging on my own site and not on Quora (not sure what's in it for me to blog on Quora). In the past, I've seen other blogs (e.g. TechCrunch) use Quora posts as the basis for articles too.
In terms of the "is Quora a vitamin or pain killer" question, it's very much a vitamin for me. Stack Exchange is a much better community for getting specific technical answers, which are the most common kinds of questions I hunt for on the web. I tend to ask my personal network for business & marketing questions, since it's difficult to explain my specific situation in a Quora question. (Being too specific sometimes runs the risk of no answers; being too general sometimes runs the risk of unhelpful answers, I've found.)
I would suspect this is the foundation for a pivot too. The advice from the YC partners and alumni network could be pretty helpful.
So best of luck to whatever they are going to pivot into!
Asked the same question on Quora [1]. Adam D'Angelo's answer:
There are a bunch of reasons why it's valuable for Quora to be a YC company:
>>We'll have Sam and all the other partners to help us.
>>We get to be part of the YC community / alumni network of founders.
>>We get access to all the resources of YC.
We were raising money anyway, so there was no overhead in letting YC participate. And independent of the benefits to Quora, I think it will be fun personally to participate in some of the YC events. I hope my perspective can help some of the other companies.
I wonder if YC is not taking any stake (or a very small stake) in Quora. They do not really need it, perhaps it's just beneficial for both parties.
Quora gains a large number of connections, possible companies to fund/buyout, a network of founders to answer questions, complimentary services, and some prestige.
YC gains a larger network, another large(ish) player in the tech industry, and potentially some money from an investment.
OR
Perhaps YC put something like $8mm into Quora for a slice of the pie, but I'm guessing the first one.
The post says they're "participating in Quora's most recent investment round". The normal meaning of that would be that they're buying at the same price/valuation as that Series C round, so if it's anything like YC's usual size of investment it would be a very small stake.
(Ex-Quora employee, but I have no inside information.)
Good engineers are hard to find. Quora actually has a lot of smart folks participating -- what better place to find people for your startups and companies than that?
Regarding the "Why join YC?", Adam has answered this on Quora:
here are a bunch of reasons why it's valuable for Quora to be a YC company:
We'll have Sam and all the other partners to help us.
We get to be part of the YC community / alumni network of founders.
We get access to all the resources of YC.
We were raising money anyway, so there was no overhead in letting YC participate. And independent of the benefits to Quora, I think it will be fun personally to participate in some of the YC events. I hope my perspective can help some of the other companies.
YC is run by some of the smartest people in the valley. Quora obviously see their ability to help with the direction and strategy of their business valuable.
- Network connections? Their CEO is the former CTO of Facebook.
- Help with fundraising? They raised $80mm at $900mm valuation not more than a month ago.
I strongly suspect Quora is planning a huge pivot which they feel is ambitious but doable in 3 months, and YC believes in the value of this pivot; that is the only plausible explanation I can think of.